A presidential advisory commission has unanimously voted to recommend US President Joe Biden to process all applications for green cards or permanent residency within six months. If approved, this proposal is likely to bring cheers to the hundreds and thousands of Indian-Americans including those waiting for it for decades, for a Green Card. The recommendations of the President’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders (PACAANHPI) are to be sent to the White House now for approval.
A proposal on the issue was moved by eminent Indian-American community leader Ajay Jain Bhutoria during the meeting of the PACAANHPI, during which all its 25 commissioners unanimously approved it. The proceedings of the meeting here in the national capital were webcast live last week.
Indian IT professionals, most of whom are highly skilled and come to the US mainly on the H-1B work visas, are the worst sufferers of the current immigration system which imposes a seven per cent per country quota on allotment of the coveted Green Card or permanent legal residency.
To reduce the pending Green Card backlog, the advisory commission recommended the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to review their processes, systems, and policies and establish new internal cycle time goals by streamlining processes, removing redundant steps if any, automating any manual approvals, improving their internal dashboards and reporting system and enhancing policies.
The recommendations aim to reduce the cycle time for processing all forms related to family-based Green Card applications, DACA renewals and all other Green Card applications within six months and issue adjudicate decisions within six months of applications received by it.
The commission recommended National Visa Center (NVC) State Department facility to hire additional officers to increase their capacity to process Green Card applications interviews by 100 per cent in three months from August 2022, and to increase Green Card Card applications visa interviews and adjudicate decisions by 150 per cent up from capacity of 32,439 in April 2022 — by April 2023.
Thereafter Green Card visa interviews and visa processing timeline should be a maximum of six months, it said.
Aimed at making it easier for the immigrants to stay and work in the country, the commission recommended that the USCIS should review requests for work permits, travel documents and temporary status extensions or changes within three months and adjudicate decisions.
Noting that while the US population has grown substantially in recent decades, the immigration system has not changed to keep pace, Bhutoria said. The annual levels of immigration were established in the early 1990s and have remained largely unchanged since then, he said.
To make matters worse, the method used to calculate the annual number of employment-and-family-based immigration is deeply flawed, and has led to family-based immigration levels being set at their absolute minimum every year for the past 20 years, while hundreds of thousands of green cards for family members go wasted, never used by any individuals when they could be used to reunite families instead, Bhutoria said.
0 Comments